But Kenyon’s views have been a matter of chronic concern since he began injecting them into his teaching more than a decade ago, says university dean James Kelly, an oceanographer. So “18 years of student complaints” seemed like enough evidence. Department chairman John Hafernik adds that there was no due process to violate. He calls Kenyon’s reassignment a “scheduling decision” that shoukld never have gone outside the department. But it did and now it’s back. Kelly said Kenyon (who is now teaching only labs) has been offered a chance to conduct an advasnced seminar where his ideas can be explored. But Kenyon wants his into course back, saying “I’m not going to drop this issue.” He won’t get more specific, but university officials fear a lawsuit in the making.

If there is persecution going on, one has to wonder just who it is at the receiving end. The people at the Discovery Institute seem far more inclined to threaten lawsuits than to conduct any research.

This is almost certainly referring to Dean Kenyon of SFSU. You can read a short account by Philip Johnson here. According to Johnson, Kenyon was never threatened with the sack, and it was students, not administrators, who complained that he was teaching religion in the guise of science. Even still, he was allowed to keep teaching his biology class without sanction. (And note one subtle difference between reality and the retelling: Kenyon was advocating ID outright, not merely “arguing that evolution does not explain everything.” This is a common bait-and-switch.)

Now Philip Johnson is hardly a credible source, but even his account contradicts the basic retelling by Micklethwait and Wooldridge (which they probably adopted nearly verbatim from Chapman). This is typical. IDist martyrdom stories become exaggerated and mythologized faster than fishing tales about the one that got away. Chapman, who is an extremely dishonest individual, seems to specialize in blowing otherwise mundane inquiries about impropriety all out of proportion, all but declaring them to be literal witch hunts. Thus he feeds the irrational persecution complex that has infected religious conservatives in this country.

What the hell is a Jesuit—and therefore supposedly orthodox and intellectually elite—university doing playing footsie with these types?

I don’t know about this specific case, but the ID movement has a long history of renting out space at colleges and universities, and then implying that these get-togethers were hosted by those universities. Thus they’ll refer to the “Yale Conference”, which really means that they rented out a room at Yale and hosted the same 10-15 speakers who been saying the same self-referential and self-congratulatory things for years. Of course anyone with sufficient funds could have rented out the room, and Yale was probably not a convenient spot to begin with, but hey, perception is everything.

What do you find stupid in the quote and what do you think makes Mill “Cap’n Stoopid” generally?

What the hell is a Jesuit—and therefore supposedly orthodox and intellectually elite—university doing playing footsie with these types?

Would Georgetown do such? Or Fordham?

What is happening out there?

But, still: if you are going to count any effective rhetoric as ‘winning the war of ideas’ – if you don’t even make any attempt to test, prima facie, for intellectual seriousness and credibility – then you ought to just ‘fess up that you mean ‘winning the culture war’, which sounds less intellectually high-toned.

Except of course the extreme form that blew up a federal office building in Oklahoma City, killing more than 150 of conservatices’ fellow Americans.

Except of course the extrem form that firebombed abortion clinics and advocated the murder of doctors who performed abortions.

Gotta admire that restraint.

According to the local paper, Austin is hosting 4,200 hurricane evacuees. This may not be as many as the cities you mention, but they are also larger cities than Austin.

Austin is, furthermore, a Democratic-leaning city. Within Texas it has a reputation for liberalism.

Travis County, which contains Austin, voted 56% for Kerry, 42% for Bush, in last year’s election (compare to Dallas County, which went 50% for Bush, 49% for Kerry), which is represented in Congress by a Democrat, and although Texas mayors are elected on a nonpartisan basis, the mayor of Austin says he votes Democratic.

That is a curious quote.

Less than 50% white?

Most major metropolitan areas controlled by Democrats (even more so with the refugees who are all about to become Texas voters)? (Note, the counties they are in are usually Republican, but the cities tend to be Democratic, except for Austin—but Austin did not take tens of thousands of refugees like Houston, Dallas or San Antonio).

That is an amazing statement.

(That’s really still pretty fucking stupid, though, even for Cap’n Stoopid himself.)